Article by Bakhtavar Desai, Co-Chair FEZANA Interfaith Activities Committee
This past month the Parliament of the World’s Religions returned to Chicago, the birthplace of the modern interfaith movement, after 30 years, to celebrate 130 years of its history in this great city. This 9 th convening of the Parliament attracted participants from more than 200 diverse religious, indigenous, and secular beliefs and more than 80 nations, to advance the theme of “A Call to Conscience: defending Freedom and Human Rights”. Around 7000 people attended this Parliament which took place at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center in Chicago from 14th to 18th Aug.
This was one of the largest interfaith conference and festival, of global scale, featuring jam-packed days of mainstage talks from luminaries, critical issue plenaries, interactive programs, profound spiritual performances, and this year – even a parade !!!– all centering on a promise of peace, justice, and sustainability for our world.
Along with Dolly Dastoor and Mahrukh Motafram, the two Zoroastrian Board Members of the Parliament, Homi Gandhi and myself, who co-chair the Interfaith Activities Committee, called out to our FEZANA community in summer of last year, to join us in planning and representing FEZANA at this year’s Parliament.
Our goal was to enable participation in this Parliament from people of all ages, young and old, and from diverse backgrounds, from our North American Zoroastrian Community. We succeeded in getting close to 50 speakers and performers, and attendees, from Zoroastrian communities from 15 states in the US, (IL, OH, CA, IN, MI, WA, Washington DC, MD, NY, NJ, Connecticut, PA, GA, WI, TX), and, other countries, like Canada, India, and UK. Including all the attendees and volunteers and speakers, and the groups that participated in the Parade of Faiths, our Zoroastrian delegation at the Parliament must have easily reached one hundred people if not more.
We also brought in dozens of speakers from other faith communities to participate in several of our FEZANA organized/sponsored interfaith programs, because this Parliament was the best platform we could have to have meaningful and productive dialogs with representatives from other faith communities!
FEZANA presented over two dozen programs at the Parliament on tracks of Faith & Interfaith Understanding, Climate Action, The Global Ethic, Peace & Justice, The Next Generation, Women and Girls, Science, Religion, and Music; Dance performances.
Besides presenting dozens of programs at the Parliament, FEZANA also had an Exhibit Booth, a Kids’ Booth in the PoWR Kids section, as well as a Faith Room where we had daily talks on Zoroastrian ceremonies, and exhibits on our cultural and religious art and artifacts to spread further awareness about our heritage. The theme of the Kids’ booth was the ‘Birth of Human Rights, and Care for Creation. We also had three well received Exhibits – Cyrus & the Cyrus Cylinder; A Collage of messages on human rights from Zoroastrians around the world, arranged in the shape of a Farohar; and an Exhibit on the Swastika symbol.
ZAMC, Chicago’s Zoroastrian community, under the leadership of Jamshed Rivetna, helped us significantly, in recruiting a large team of enthusiastic and willing kids, youth and adult volunteers to help us at our booths and the faith room throughout the week. ZAMC also led the planning of our successful participation in the Parade of Faiths a day before the Parliament began, on 13th August. We had a good size delegation marching in the parade in FEZANA t-shirts made specially for this Parliament, carrying ZAMC; FEZANA banners and signs with Zoroastrian messages, and the Farohar symbol.
There were three Zoroastrian Luminary Speakers among the several amazing Luminary Speakers invited by the Parliament. Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman was invited to speak in the Community Plenary, Parisa Khosravi was invited to speak in the Conscience Plenary, and Sousan Abadian, was invited to speak in the Crisis Plenary! Several Zoroastrian music and dance performers of all ages from the US and Canada, also performed in some music and dance programs at the Parliament.
It was heartwarming to see close to a hundred Zoroastrians working together, happily, in good fellowship throughout these past several months, which helped make this journey very spirited, inspirational and memorable. Overall, our Zoroastrian presence at the Parliament was strong and meaningful. It truly took a village to make FEZANAs presence felt at this years Parliament! Homi and I extend our gratitude to FEZANA for its tremendous support towards our work throughout the planning and execution stages for over a year, and to each and every person we worked with along the way, including the PoWR Board Members, the panelists & performers, attendees, and all our wonderful youth and adult volunteers, all of whom helped to make our participation and presence at the Parliament successful and very much felt.
